


Red Sky at Morning

by ap_trash_compactor



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 16:14:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16370882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ap_trash_compactor/pseuds/ap_trash_compactor
Summary: Some things need to be said out loud.





	Red Sky at Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pepper (Zalt)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zalt/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Rainbow's End](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16365638) by [Pepper (Zalt)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zalt/pseuds/Pepper). 



> This is only listed as a gift to Pepper so the metadata is complete, but really her giving me permission to write a (smutty) remix of the third part of her fabulous trilogy of one-shots was an incredible gift from her to me, and I'm utterly grateful for it. Please read Walking the Rainbow first, firstly because it's lovely, and secondly because this won't make sense otherwise.

It is a small and private act of tenderness from Arihnda that wakes him, one that almost surprises him.

It is not exactly new, of course: she has woken him very often like this since Planetfall. In the depth of night, returning from her place of work, by accident. In their bed, or in the front room of their domicile, when he is asleep with their daughter curled on his chest or at his side, Arihnda will try unobtrusively to join them: to crawl into the bed on the other side of Ras, or to curl up beside them on the couch. It never fails to wake him -- or to move him, sparking a familiar pulse deep in his chest. Usually he will reach for her: touch her face, or take her hand, and pull her close. Pull her and Ras close, both: hold them near, these two strange twists in his fate.

It is not a bad way to sleep, or to wake -- or to live.

But being woken like this has become increasingly unusual over the past few months. He has been puzzling over it, a little. She is very busy, and very tired. She does not do well with exhaustion; lack of sleep plays worse havoc with her nerves than it does with his. Perhaps she simply needs more rest, the peace of solitude. And probably, he thinks, she is a little anxious, too, about the change that is coming.

She has poured a great deal of herself into building Rainbow, as much of herself as she poured into Ras during their decade aboard the Chimaera, and he understands that the prospect of the settlement altering around her without her express permission is likely somewhat unsettling -- as, perhaps, it is unsettling for her to watch Ras change and grow in new and unexpected ways. He is not precisely worried, but he finds himself missing her, a little. He finds himself wanting her near.

So when she wakes him, when he sees her serious, slightly worried face in the dim light, perceives her hands tucking a blanket around his shoulder, he sits up carefully, and takes her hand, and squeezes it in a way that is meant to say both hello and give me one moment.

She lets him take her hand again, when Ras is tucked into the couch. She lets him lead her to their bedroom. He closes the door behind them -- a prudent precaution when an inquisitive child shares one’s living space -- and returns to her, and pulls her close. She yields to that, too, which is always the way with her. Nothing is ever exactly given: she takes, or she yields. He has long since developed an appreciation for the idiosyncrasies with which she does both.

She yields a little tonight, but not all the way. This is not entirely unusual: she will yield more if she is asked in the right way. He takes a great deal of pleasure in unraveling her in the right way, most of the time. And he is in no hurry. He enjoys the feel of the soft silk of her dress as it slides teasingly between his palms and the curves of her sides, enjoys the scent of her hair and her skin, enjoys the feel of her hands on his shoulders, and the taste of the skin of her neck beneath his lips as she tilts her head to the side for him -- but she is still yielding only a little, and that only rigidly.

He pulls back to look at her. She avoids his gaze. Never a good sign.

He runs a hand against her face, gently, and then runs his fingers through her hair. “What is wrong?” He ask the question once with his voice, and then repeats it with his hands: stroking her hair, watching her expression shift as she struggles to find her words.

Finally, she looks up at him, eyes bright. Never, ever a good sign. But not necessarily a fatal one. Sometimes strange, good things have come from it: out of her distress she has, on some terrible and memorable occasions, yielded everything up to him in ways that made him fiercely tender and assiduously reverent with her body, and her spirit. If she can see her way her clear to opening herself enough to tell him what is truly wrong…

He holds himself still, patient, and waits for her to come to him.

"Planetfall is almost here,” she says finally. “The year is up. I know you have held back on telling everyone that work on the Chimaera is done and that we are ready to depart. It makes sense, I suppose, to want to make that reveal during the celebrations. But... I need to know."  
  
"What do you need to know?" he murmurs, stroking a hand through her hair again.  
  
"What will happen now. Where will you go? Will you return to your people? The Chiss, I mean... You told me you were only in the Empire in the hope of building a useful alliance, and now the Empire is gone." She plucks at the front of his shirt, a nervous gesture, one that plucks at a place deep inside him just as it touches the warp and weft of his clothing. "You won’t need Ras anymore,” she goes on, her voice a little queer, “the scouts have found normal hyperlanes to travel. If we disband the settlement... you won’t need me."  
  
He blinks slowly, as he finally realizes what she is saying.

Realizes it, and feels several things at once. Foremost among them is an awful impulse to take her face in his hands, pull her close, drive out her hurts with wordless pleasure --

But everything else he feels is some variation on pain. There is guilt, of course: sharp and searing, like the cut of a blade. Grief: hot and aching. And anger: a dull throb of something like betrayal. How can you know me no better than this?

For a moment he only clutches her hands in his, staring at them. Then he says, quite seriously, voice low: “Do you imagine I will leave Ras?” The gasp that rises out of Arihnda is muted, but no less acute than if she had been shot. She tries for a second to pull her hands away, and he grips them tightly. He raises his eyes to her face. He feels another stab of pain at seeing the expression there, but he continues, carefully: “As you imagine I no longer need our daughter, do you expect that I will abandon her?”

“No --” It is more objection than answer, whispered and awful.

“No,” he murmurs back, pulling her hands against his chest. “Do you imagine, then, I would take her from you?”

His personal name rises from her lips like breath: “Raw --”

“Do you imagine,” he goes on, pressing her hands to his chest with one of his hands and reaching for her face with the other, “that I am done with you, as if you were an empty crate?” She shivers at the touch of his fingers on her cheek, eyes fluttering closed for half a moment. Her eyelashes are shimmering, wet. Her fingers curl against his chest, and he lifts his hand from atop them and grasps her waist and pulls her closer. “Did you expect that I would simply discard you?”

She gives a kind of shudder and drops her gaze again, shaking her head. “This wasn’t --” she whispers -- “I mean, you didn’t -- we never intended --” Her voice trails off, and she is simply still.

He is still too, for a moment, looking at her bowed head, her hunched shoulders. It is true that everything that has grown between them has grown, more or less, from accidents and surprises. Pensively, he runs a hand through her hair. It is also true, he reflects, that he has never explicated for her -- or even deeply considered for himself -- that he finds he is glad of most of those surprises. She does prefer the concrete to the abstract, he knows. Perhaps, he thinks, feeling an aching surge of grief, some version of this doubt has weighed on her for all of their years together.

He slides his arms around her, and pulls her tight against him, and is relieved to feel her fold pliantly into his body. He holds her, and feels her breathe, feels the gentle pressure of her ribs expanding and contracting within his arms. She turns her head to the side, leans more of her weight against him. He tightens his arms around her and lowers his mouth to her ear. The concrete, he thinks. The explicit. Something she needs to hear, that he has never said.

“The unexpected is not always the unwanted,” he murmurs to her softly. He turns his head just slightly and kisses her face just beside her ear. “I have not planned to leave you, my love” he goes on, feeling a strange mix of sorrow and enjoyment when her breath hitches at the word love. “I want you.”

She is silent in response to that, so he tries again. “I want you. Should I show you?” He runs one of his hands down her spine in a way that makes her shiver involuntarily. That makes him smile a little, with amusement. He tilts his head back and finds her staring at him, still skeptical, eyes still shining. He cups her cheek. “I want you,” he continues seriously. “Should I show you how you much?”

She takes a shallow breath; he can almost hear the air as it moves between her dry lips.

He lowers his head slowly, as if to kiss her. “Should I show you, my love?” he whispers against her mouth.

Her fingers tighten in his shirt-front again, and she makes a little noise -- a sound that makes his fingers curl against her back -- and she pushes her mouth against his.

It’s good, he thinks, touching her face gently with one hand as she clutches his shirt and kisses him, that she can still want him after so many years. And, he muses further, leaning into the kiss, it is very pleasant that he still wants her, too. They had seen many couples drift apart, or collapse like stars, over the past decade. Such knowledge of one’s fellows was hard to avoid in cramped ship-board circumstances. But that had never been, he thought, a danger with them -- and for him, at least, fidelity was not something manufactured purely for the sake of creating stability for Ras.

He wants to show that to Arihnda, too, somehow.

He leans into the kiss until it fades of its own accord, and then gathers her back against his chest. Her breathing is a little strained. He kisses her temple. “I love you,” he says. She makes a small sound and he pulls her tight against him and says it again, low and fierce: “I love you.” After a few breaths, he says again: “I love you.” He runs his hand through her hair. “I love you, Arihnda. Will you let me show you?”

For a moment, silence. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. Then, speaking into his shirt-front, her voice watery and half a moan, she says: “Yes.”

He takes a breath of his own -- not quite shuddering, but a little unsteady -- and pushes her face away from his chest, dips his head, and kisses her: deep and probing, hungry and proprietary. Then he stoops a little, and looping an arm under her rear, picks her up.

It is only a few steps to the bed. He deposits her there and crawls onto it after her, kneeling between her feet, and pushes the hem of her dress slowly up her legs.

“I love you,” he says again, watching her face, holding her gaze. Her lips are slightly parted, eyes still wide and bright. For a moment, he abandons the project of undressing her and, taken with a sudden fervor, crawls forward on his hands and kisses her fiercely. He lowers some of the weight of his torso onto her: stomach to stomach, chest to chest. He is propped on one elbow, hand moving awkwardly through her hair. His other hand is still on her thigh, haphazardly scrunching up the skirt of her dress.

Her hands move unevenly across his body as he kisses her, her fingers curling from time to time almost like claws.

He kisses her jaw, her neck, the curve of collarbones, the window of decolletage accessible above the neckline of her dress. His breathing is coming harder, and so is hers. “I love you,” he whispers as he kisses her. It makes her whimper when he says it, and that makes him say it more: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

His kisses reach the fabric of her dress, and taking a heavy breath, he presses his forehead between her breasts. She rests her hands on his head.

“I love you,” he says again, almost muttering, and sits back on his knees. Her hands travel part of the way with him, then fall back against her chest, curled almost protectively there. Her lips are red from his attention, and her eyes are starting to look bright in a different, far better way.

He slides her skirt all the way up to her hips, and rubs his palms along the length of her thighs: hip to knee. “I love you,” he says again, a little more firmly. He reaches under her skirt and hooks his thumbs into her underthings, and she lifts her hips just enough for him to pull them off. He pulls them over her legs and tosses them aside. Then he sits back a little further, lowering his weight onto his heels, and strokes his fingers lightly from her knees along her calves, to her ankles. Then he lifts her feet, one at a time, and kisses their soles.

“I love you,” he says, setting her foot down, stroking the top of its arch for a moment. He leans forward and kisses the tops of her her knees. He reaches to her hips, and begins to push the bunched fabric of her dress up over them. She lifts them a little, to help, and he pushes her dress up just beneath her breasts.

He runs his fingers from her ribs, down her midriff, down over hips, along her thighs, back to her knees, which have drifted closed, and pushes her legs wide apart. She is watching him with wide, glassy eyes. Her breathing is shallow. “I love you,” he says again, lowering his weight between her knees and kissing the fluttering skin of her belly below the archway of her ribs. He can almost see her heartbeat, a faint pulse in the soft expanse of her belly. “I love you.” He kisses down the middle of her belly, and passes below her belly button. He raises himself up a little on one elbow, and strokes the twisting lines of silver skin that spider across her lower abdomen like veins of precious ore.

“Do you remember getting these?” he asks idly.

“Do I -- yes,” she says, a mix of curious uncertainty and mild annoyance in her tone. Of course she remembers being pregnant with Ras.

He kisses the marks on the right side of her belly first. What the Force was, or was not, he did not care to speculate, but these marks had come from Ras, and Ras had come from him: that he knew with certainty. He kisses the marks on the left side. Perhaps the Force had been called to give them Ras because what he feels for Arihnda now -- and what he thinks she feels for him -- had been latent between, even them. He kisses the middle of her belly.

Then he kisses lower, into the tangle of hair that crowns the space between her legs.

“No,” she whispers.

He raises his head to look at her. Her face is taut, strained. Sometimes she is like this: when she feels acutely fragile, acutely vulnerable, she does not let him do this. It had been forbidden to him for almost all of her pregnancy, although she had let him explore her at length with his fingers, and had wanted to be fucked more than he would have believed possible. Suddenly he recalls the first time she had come to his quarters to ask for assistance, her belly swollen and her face red as a beet… He almost laughs at the memory.

“No,” he echoes agreeably, kissing her hip. He works his way back up her belly, mouth moving softly all the way from her hips to her ribs, and then he pulls her sideways into his arms and kisses her brow. He slides his hands along the length of her body, rubbing the soft curve of her waist, and kisses her mouth gently, and then less gently, until she seems distracted from her moment of refusal. He keeps kissing her, moving his hands over her torso, and then begins to peel her dress the rest of the way off, pushing it over her breasts, which are unbound beneath the fitted silk bodice. She lifts her arms to let him pull the dress over her head and toss it aside to the floor. Then he pulls her close again, and kisses her slowly, one hand wandering to her breasts.

Her breasts are different now than they were the first time he had felt them: less full, and softer. Another mark of time, of course, but also a change brought on by bearing and nursing their child -- which is to say, by what there was, and what there still is, between them. He likes exploring these changes, just as he likes examining her stretch marks. It is, he thinks, like nature itself has written his presence permanently into her body.

Her hands are in his hair, moving repetitively, soothingly, gently. Their faces are close together and he is still kissing her, a little, slowly. His eyes are closed. His focus is on his hand: what he is doing, and what he can feel. He circles his thumb against her nipple until it begins to harden, and then alternates between massaging her whole breast and teasing her nipple with her fingers.

Her breathing is soft at first, but then she moans, just a little, and he dips his head eagerly to her chest to follow with his mouth where his hands have been.

He takes her nipple between his teeth and scrapes along the tender flesh for just a second, and she gasps clutches at his head: a reliable response, a reminder that he still knows her well, and knows what to do for her, and how to do it. He lets her pull him close to her breast and opens his jaw, pressing his tongue against the point of her nipple until her grip on him softens a little. Then he closes his lips and sucks, gently, slowly pulling his head back. She gives a muted, stifled cry, and curls her fingers in his hair.

He pulls his head all the way back and blows softly on her wet skin, making her gasp quitely again. Then he kisses the side of her breast: it makes her whimper, a familiar response. He kisses the swell of her breast, then moves his attention to its twin and repeats the process. Her responses are breathier here, and quieter. He raises his head to look at her face, and finds her eyes are closed, her expression lost. A good kind of lost, he thinks, and he lowers his mouth to her breasts again, attending to them idly and with enjoyment until her breathing becomes deep and slow, and the motions of her hands in his hair seem relaxed.

He raises his head, and finds she is looking at him with heavy-lidded eyes.

She licks her lips, as if to say something, then stops.

“What is it?” he whispers, a shadow of worry passing through him.

She runs her hands through his hair twice before trying to speak again. Finally, she whispers: “Raw. I love you, too.”

He has the strange sense that more is coming, so he holds still, one hand against her ribs, and waits.

“I love you,” she says again with a shuddering breath. “You and Ras, both.” Another breath. “I love you both, more --” her voice cracks a little -- “more than anything.”

He is suspended, for a moment, before the feeling surging in his chest makes him surge forward, too, to kiss her, pushing her back and down into the mattress as he does. He kisses her devouringly, until they are both out of breath, and gasping against each other. Then he kisses her again: slower, but just as hungry. His hand wanders down her torso as he kisses her, and he slides his hand between her legs. He finds she’s slick already, warm and wet and soft beneath his touch. He slides a finger inside of her and she moans against his mouth.

He breaks the kiss: presses his forehead to hers and begins to work his finger inside her. She makes another little sound and tightens her hands where she's holding him: his upper arm, and the back of his neck. He kisses her once, briefly, on the temple.

“You did not think that I loved you in return,” he says to her gently, almost chiding, pulling his finger out of her and pressing it against her clit.

She gives a little whimper.

He circles his finger gently against her clit, which is soft and slick and swollen from desire. She squirms and he kisses her temple. “Did it never occur to you that I might care?” He presses on her clit a little more firmy, moves his finger a little faster. She bites her lip and squeezes her eyes closed. “That I might value you?” She whimpers again. “That Ras might be more than merely a means to an end?” Her body jerks, and she gives a stifled cry. He moves his hand, cupping the flesh between her legs gently, rubbing it just a little. “I had thought it was so obvious,” he muses aloud. “I had not thought you needed to have it said so plainly.”

She takes a shuddering breath and turns into him. He pulls his hand from between her legs and wraps his arm around her.

“I was… I was never sure,” she admits, whispering against his chest.

It hurts to hear, of course. For a minute he only holds her, resting his face against the soft silk of her hair. Finally, he says: “I would have told you, had I known you needed it said.”

She presses her body tight against his. “I know,” she whispers. “That’s why I could never ask.”

Her confession strikes his heart directly. It gives him the a sudden, aching need to be as close to her as possible, as if he could drive out even the memory of her uncertainty if only he could be near enough to her. He lifts her face from his chest with one hand and then kisses her fiercely.

After a half a moment’s reticence, she kisses him back the same way, clinging to him as she had more than once on the Chimaera, as if he were the only place of safety in the universe. He pushes away from her just long enough to pull his shirt off and then she is touching his skin, holding him, kissing him, and one of her hands is fumbling with his as they both work to remove his pants.

“How do you want it?” he whispers between kisses, reduced suddenly to a stupid kind of efficiency. “Do you want to be on top?” That’s something she often enjoys, but she shakes her head, and he sees her eyes are shining again.

“I just want you,” she mutters a little incoherently, but he knows what that means, too. Once when Ras was still a baby Arihnda had sunk into a pit of distress so deep it had actually frightened him, and finally she had confessed that she didn’t know what to do with a child without her parents to help. He thinks that what she wants now is much the same as what she had needed the night she had admitted her fear.

He kicks his pants and underthings off and tosses them aside and then turns back to her. He kisses her body again, touching his lips to her skin with desperate, burning tenderness. He kisses her neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingertips, collarbone, breasts, belly, hips, thighs, and then kisses all the same places, moving back up to her face again, and sliding one arm beneath her back as if to support her before saying: “Yes?”

Her eyes are closed. She nods, clinging to his shoulders with her fingertips as he enters her.

She gives a little moan and he kisses her mouth softly and strokes the side of her face. “I love you,” he murmurs, beginning to rock gently against her. She whimpers, as if she is stifling a sob, and he kisses her again, rocking gently. “I love you,” he whispers.

“I know,” she whispers back. “I know.”

She keeps her eyes closed the entire time. His movement inside her is careful and steady, and he murmurs I love you, I love you, I love you like an invocation, stroking her face and her hair and kissing her over and over again until she shudders, whimpering, against him. He gives her a moment of silence and she digs her fingers into his shoulders and moans: “You, too,” and he buries his face in her neck and, chanting iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou, moves just fast enough for a few moments to finish himself.

After, there are a few moments of quiet, ragged breathing, their bodies intertwined, the muted sounds of night floating through the window.

Then he raises his head to look at her, and finds her face slightly mottled with high color, her eyes a little puffy, her full lips spit-slick and swollen: unwound and unraveled and utterly open. She looks, he thinks, with a pang in his chest, exquisite.

“I love you,” he says again, kissing her brow, “and I will not leave you. I would not even have considered the idea.” He pauses, and brushes her cheek with his thumb, fondly. “Eleven years ago, perhaps…”

Arihnda chokes on a kind of laugh, watery but real, and he kisses her mouth: lingering and slow and deep. When the kiss is over, he moves them both so that he is laying on his side and she is tucked against him, and he kisses her forehead, and then presses his face to the top of her head.

“Whatever happens, I intend for you and Ras to be with me,” he whispers into her hair. He kisses the crown of her skull. “I want you both near.”

“So you’ll stay, then?” she murmurs.

He hesitates only a second. “We will stay, yes.” He runs his hand through her hair. “Although I expect there is much more for you to do off of this planet rather than on it.”

Arihnda gives a kind of sniffling sigh. “Let’s not talk about it now.”

“Mm,” he says, kissing her temple absently and sitting up to grope for a blanket, which he pulls over them both, tucking it around her as he tucks her in against him again with care. “No, not right now.”

\---

Arihnda, who has slept through ship-wide alarms on the Chimaera, wakes almost instantly at the sound of her daughter’s voice calling from outside the bedroom door. Not distressed, just loud enough to be heard. Probably right outside the door.

“I will get her,” Thrawn murmurs from beside her, rising faster than she can, stopping only to pull on underthings on the way to the door. Arihnda rolls to the side of the bed and scoops her soft blue dress off the floor, pulling it over her head and shimmying into it as Thrawn unlatches the door.

Ras crosses the room and climbs into the bed, wiggling down into the bedding beside Arihnda without question or pretence. Kitty hops onto the foot of the bed and curls there with similar aplomb.

It is sunrise, Arihnda she notes as her gaze travels over the far window as she lays back down and pulls her daughter close: soft red light is spreading through the grey, pre-dawn sky, the kind of light that heralds storms. She kisses the top of Ras’s head. “Bad dreams, kitten?”

“No,” Ras chirps simply. She doesn’t add anything else.

Thrawn climbs into bed on the other side of Ras, one arm reaching across their daughter’s small frame to hold Arihnda. “No bad dreams,” he repeats, looking at Arihnda over the top of Ras’s head. The years when Ras was two until she was six had been in a way an extended nightmare for both Thrawn and Arihnda: Ras’s force-sensitivity made her sensitive to the stresses of the crew, and she had been plagued by night terrors until she has been old enough to learn meditative shielding techniques from Ezra. They had grown quite used to sleeping all together during those years, and the habit still had not entirely been broken.

Arihnda runs her hand through Ras’s hair again. “Do you need something?”

“I was just lonely,” she says with sleepy distraction. “I’m going to miss people after the party.”

Arihnda shoots a worried glance at Thrawn. Ras’s powers have not faded. With Ezra’s tutelage they are growing and changing, but sometimes she will still have flashes of the future.

Thrawn shakes his head almost imperceptibly at Arihnda, as if to say: not us, she does not mean us. Then he moves his hand from Arihnda’s side to Ras’s elbow, and says: “Who are you going to miss?”

“Everyone who stays here,” she says sleepily, yawning.

Arihnda has to work very hard, suddenly, to keep from clutching Ras in a vice-grip.

Thrawn, too, looks vaguely perturbed. He puts his hands atop Arihnda’s, on Ras’s shoulder. All of them, together, as Arihnda wants it to be. And, evidently, as Thrawn thinks it should be. “Why will you miss them?” he asks.

“‘Cause we’re going exploring,” Ras says.

“Are we?” asks Arihnda.

“Mm-hm,” says Ras, in a voice going soft-edged with encroaching sleep. “Ezra’s been telling me how much there is to see in the Galaxy,” she goes on, starting to mumble, burrowing her face against her mother’s neck, “and I saw us going to see it together.”


End file.
